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JWG

Cookbooks for Christmas?

December 25th, 2009

I'm a big fan of Adam Gopnik who writes columns for The New Yorker. A few years ago he lived in Paris and his book Paris to the Moon, a collection of articles while he was there is hilarious and quite insightful as well.

Last night, my bedtime reading was his What's the Recipe article from the Nov 23 New Yorker. He makes lots of fun of trends and points out the many flaws of cookbookery. Needless to say there were lots of giggles and it was hard to concentrate.

I don't think I'll take a recipe seriously from now on (not that I do anyway since I like to improvise).

An excerpt

The cult of the cooking vessel—the wok, the tagine, the Dutch oven, the smoker, the hibachi, the Tibetan kiln or the Inuit ice oven or whatever—seems to be over. Paula Wolfert has a new book devoted to clay-pot cooking, but it feels too ambitious in advance; we have tried too many other modish pots, and know that, like Elvis’s and Michael Jackson’s chimps, after their hour is done they will live out their years forgotten and alone, on the floor of the closet, alongside the fondue forks and the spice grinder and the George Foreman grill.